Venezuela adopts Open Source

Moving to Open Source software has been contemplated for some time in more than one South American country, with Peruvian Congressman Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez having written a widely celebrated Open Letter to Microsoft in which he politely but thoroughly demolishes a veritable raft of Microsoft FUD-mongering, carefully point by point.

Announced last Wednesday, this new Venezuelan government policy was approved by a majority of the country's Executive Committee. It was characterized in a statement by Dr. Felipe Pérez-Martí, Planning and Development Minister, as "Open source whenever possible, proprietary software only when necessary."

Key points of the Venezuelan government's commitment so far include:

* All software developed for the government must be licensed under the GPL.
* Official accounting software for Venezuela must be GPL licensed.
* The government will openly combat software piracy, and all unlicensed proprietary software will be purged from government offices.
* A new internet access program will be established for the citizenry using Linux-based computers provided under community franchises.

They're still working out some of the details, with the assistance of advisors from the Venezuelan Linux Users Group (VELUG) and elsewhere.

The fundamental motivations for this shift in Venezuelan government policy are reported to be financial and development related. From the LinuxToday story:

"According to Pérez-Martí, the government and the people of Venezeula were increasingly concerned that over 75 percent of the funds for software licenses went to foreign nations, 20 percent to foreign support agencies, and only 5 percent to Venezuelan programmers. Pérez-Martí indicated that they wish to implement this new policy so that now Venezulan programmers will be handling most of the government's software needs,... keeping a large amount of government funds within the nation itself."

Now perhaps we'll see whether Bill can talk his buddy George W. into arranging a little coup d'état in a wayward South American country.µ